Consider that, today, more than 70% of Americans use social media—up from only 5% tallied in 2005, according to the Pew Research Center. A handful of key players in the space continue to rule. Social Media Examiner's "2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report" revealed that the top platforms used by marketers are Facebook (94%), Twitter (68%), LinkedIn (56%), Instagram (54%), YouTube (45%), Pinterest (30%), and Snapchat (7%). So what's in stor for 2018?

Russia's Mail.Ru Portal Creates Twitter-like Microblogging Site

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Russia's Mail.Ru Group launched Futubra, a new microblogging platform that allegedly resembles Twitter to a T. Futubra went up Monday, Jan.16, and is currently in beta.

Twitter was made available in Russian in April 2011 and has some 2 million Russian-speaking users. Twitter can also be translated into French, Indonesian, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish. Some Russian citizens used Twitter to protest the re-election of Prime Minister Putin, but their messages were reportedly "drowned out by PCs hijacked by hackers."

Alisher Usmanov, who owns almost one-third of Mail.Ru Group, also owns a majority of DST Global Solutions Ltd., which took a 5% ($400 million) stake in Twitter last year. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev endorsed Twitter when he appeared at the company's San Francisco headquarters in 2010 to send his first tweet.